Human Cell Atlas

Last updated
Human Cell Atlas
Content
DescriptionThe Human Cell Atlas is a global consortium that is creating detailed maps of the cells in the human body to transform understanding of health and disease.
Organisms Human
Contact
Primary citationRegev, Aviv; et al. (Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee) (2018). "The Human Cell Atlas White Paper". arXiv: 1810.05192 [q-bio.TO].
Access
Website www.humancellatlas.org

The Human Cell Atlas is a global project to describe all cell types in the human body, to understand human health and for diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. [1] The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project. [2] [3] Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann defined the goals of the project at that meeting, [4] which was convened by the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust. [5] Regev and Teichmann lead the project. [6] As of 2024, the project has mapped approximately 62 million human cells into 18 biological networks, which includes cells from vital systems such as the nervous system, lungs, heart, intestine and immune system. [7]

Contents

Description

The Human Cell Atlas will catalogue a cell based on several criteria, specifically the cell type, its state, its location in the body, the transitions it undergoes, and its lineage. [8] It will gather data from existing research, and integrate it with data collected in future research projects. [3] Among the data it will collect is the fluxome, genome, metabolome, proteome, and transcriptome. [3]

Its scope is to categorize the 37 trillion cells [9] [ citation needed ] of the human body to determine which genes each cell expresses by sampling cells from all parts of the body. [10]

All aspects of the project will be made "available to the public for free", including software and results. [11]

By April 2018, the project included more than 480 researchers conducting 185 projects. [12]

Funding

In October 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced funding for 38 projects related to the Human Cell Atlas. [13] Among them was a grant of undisclosed value to the Zuckerman Institute of the Columbia University Medical Center at Columbia University. [11] The grant, titled "A strategy for mapping the human spinal cord with single cell resolution", will fund research to identify and catalogue gene activity in all spinal cord cells. [11] The Translational Genomics Research Institute received a grant to develop a standard for the "processing and storage of solid tissues for single-cell RNA sequencing", compared to the typical practice of relying on the average of sequencing multiple cells. [13] Project home pages are available at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's website. [14]

The program is also backed by European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and the Manton Foundation. [10]

Data

In April 2018, the first data set from the project was released, representing 530,000 immune system cells collected from bone marrow and cord blood. [12]

A research program at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics published an atlas of the cells of the liver, using single-cell RNA sequencing on 10,000 normal cells obtained from nine donors. [15]

The Tabula Sapiens data was published on a dedicated website. [16]

See also

Notes

  1. Regev et al. 2018.
  2. Preidt 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Yup 2017.
  4. Sample 2016.
  5. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute 2016.
  6. Nowogrodzki 2017.
  7. "A 'Wikipedia for cells': researchers get an updated look at the Human Cell Atlas, and it's remarkable". Nature (Editorial). 635 (8039): 523–524. 2024-11-20. Bibcode:2024Natur.635..523.. doi: 10.1038/d41586-024-03754-y . PMID   39567795.
  8. Regev, p. 4.
  9. Bianconi, Eva; Piovesan, Allison; Facchin, Federica; Beraudi, Alina; Casadei, Raffaella; Frabetti, Flavia; Vitale, Lorenza; Pelleri, Maria Chiara; Tassani, Simone; Piva, Francesco; Perez-Amodio, Soledad; Strippoli, Pierluigi; Canaider, Silvia (2013). "An estimation of the number of cells in the human body". Annals of Human Biology. 40 (6): 463–471. doi:10.3109/03014460.2013.807878. ISSN   1464-5033. PMID   23829164.
  10. 1 2 Apple 2018.
  11. 1 2 3 Silva 2017.
  12. 1 2 Daley 2018.
  13. 1 2 AZ Big Media 2017.
  14. from https://www.czbiohub.org/tabula-projects/
  15. Aizarani et al. 2019.
  16. The Tabula Sapiens Consortium 2022.

References

Further reading